Design of Belarusian and Russian natural language interfaces for online help systems

Abstract

O b j e c t i v e s. The main goal of the work is a research of the natural language user interfaces and the developmentof a prototype of such an interface. The prototype is a bilingual Russian and Belarusian question-and-answer dialogue system. The research of the natural language interfaces was conducted in terms of the use of natural language for interaction between a user and a computer system. The main problems here are the ambiguity of natural language and the difficulties in the design of natural language interfaces that meet user expectations.M e t ho d s. The main principles of modelling the natural language user interfaces are considered. As an intelligent system, it consists of a database, knowledge machine and a user interface. Speech recognition and speech synthesis components make natural language interfaces more convenient from the point of view of usability.R e s u l t s. The description of the prototype of a natural language interface for a question-and-answer intelligent system is presented. The model of the prototype includes speech-to-text and text-to-speech Belarusian and Russian subsystems, generation of responses in the form of the natural language and formal text.An additional component is natural Belarusian and Russian voice input. Some of the data, required for human voice recognition, are stored as knowledge in the knowledge base or created on the basis of existing knowledge. Another important component is Belarusian and Russian voice output. This component is the top required for making the natural language interface more user-friendly.Co n c l u s i o n. The article presents the research of natural language user interfaces, the result of which provides the development and description of the prototype of the natural language interface for the intelligent question- and-answer system.